


Assortment

by lollki



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Drama, Heartache, M/M, Yearning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 10:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21098201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollki/pseuds/lollki
Summary: This is a collection of the mini prompts I've taken on tumblr - I wanted to be consistent so I'm posting them here as well!





	1. Dream

**Author's Note:**

> this was a lot of fun my dudes!

"Have you ever thought about it?"

With the shift of his weight on the matress, the springs creak and Eugene adjusts his position, accepting Merriell's head between his arms when he lies it flush against his chest. It's hot and humid to the point where it's uncomfortable, but even despite the sweat that springs up between brown skin and pale, he'd rather keep him close, now that he has the chance.

Merriell hums as he draws his eyes away from the dog-eared, black and white poster that's decorating, hiding, the awful wallpaper and tips his chin against Eugene's sternum - and there they are again: the sea green eyes with their ever-curious look, focused on him through the dim light of the room.

"You're chatty today." says Merriell to deflect, and grins when Eugene gently pushes at his cheek in reprimand.

"I'm serious. You gotta have something in mind. Don't need to be deep or anything, just-" Eugene gestures before he drops his hand into Merriell's curls. "...honest."

Merriell slowly blinks slowly - once, twice - the eye under a stripe of setting sunlight across his face glinting like a treasure. He squints, then frowns.

"I never got to think on that much, Gene. I don't know what I want."

"Nothing?"

"Not really..."

There's the sound of an engine starting and a door closing through the thin, brittle walls but not much more than that. Merriell looks distant and Eugene's almost sorry for asking him that, for getting ahead of himself, for being presumptuous.

In an effort to fix it, he suggests:

"Family?"

"Maybe."

"Money?"

"Hell, _always_."

And he's still himself enough to laugh, so it can't have cut too deep.

"Fame?"

Merriell shakes his head and starts drawing his index finger over the slope of Eugene's collarbone, following it with his eyes. He starts on the left, a sharp rise that becomes less defined the closer he gets to the hollow of his throat and when he finally reaches the sensitive dip in the center, he looks up.

"Maybe..." he starts and lets his cheek fall back onto Eugene's chest.

"I think all I want is peace."


	2. Sea

They're made of the same thing, thinks Eugene. Merriell and the ocean, they're part of one another.

His eyes make for some of the reason, of course, with the coastline blue, the crystalline green - but above that it's how he moves and how he sleeps and how he tempers. He's always had that very fundamental, natural charm about him that pulled spectators around him into a vortex with him sitting in the center of it - but no doubt is it something he was born with, soulful and old, and not a craft.

The same way one would fall asleep to the sound of waves crashing and feel at peace with the horizon an infinitude away, that same way Eugene feels when Merriell's sitting on the counter of their kitchen, skimming through the funnies section of the newspaper, dangling legs, dangling smoke, dangling lock of hair in his face. The same way the horizon blurs the distinction between sky and sea, that same way he wants to fall into him, unsure where his own body ends and Merriell's begins.

Helplessly attracted, Eugene watches Merriell wade waist-deep through the shallow water and the tip of his nose is so flushed red from the cold that Eugene can tell from a couple yards away.

It's the fact that he'd swim anyway, even with the temperatures dropping, that alone has Eugene thinking about how they must miss being one, sometimes, and if he weren't thinking in metaphors he'd feel sorry for keeping Merriell all to himself.


	3. Eyes

Eugene thinks he's going asiatic about four months in.

As he's keeping watch during the dead of the night, he's looking it every part, with the set of his eyes all red rimmed, circled, pitch black and stubborn. He's so tired he can't even think, so tired it's getting hard to breathe with all the gear weighing him down and to differentiate between what's real and what's dreamed up by that overtired brain of his and worst of all, there's his gun, the rifle he always has hefted over his shoulder, a companion so close it threatens to leave a permanent imprint through his uniform.

He's sure he'll wake up one day, once he's made it out, if he makes it out, and see a bruise the shape of it, a purple-red replica of the damn thing. With the millstone weight of it, he's threatening to slump over until his knees give and his spine bends but the one thing he won't do is close his fucking eyes because if there's any chance, he'll see them faster than they see him, he'll dig his filthy, muddy fingernails in and never let go.

He doesn't know if it's been seconds or minutes or hours or weeks but at some point there's a weight on his shoulder and it's the shape of a hand and it's warm. He doesn't even look away when he registers it, warily keeping his glance set on the deep, yawning chasm in front of him but it persists and through the warmth of it, reality comes flooding back in.

_I wouldn't even see less with my eyes closed_, he thinks desperately, he can't even see a damn thing beyond the tip of his gun pointing into the dark and it takes his name being called twice: "Eugene... _Eugene_!" for him to listen.

"I'll take watch, go rest your eyes." Shelton is suddenly next to him, where he wasn't before and that alone, the fact that it's so hard for Eugene to grasp, makes him understand the state of sheer exhaustion he's in. He hesitantly pulls his eyes away from the jungle and toward Shelton's, where they stop. The look they exhange is long and brings a mutual understanding in which Eugene sees himself mirrored in Shelton, recognizes them being an extension of each other in the most fundamental way and understands that when one leg hurt you favored the other, when one pair of eyes went blind with wear, you used the other.

"You're staring."

says Shelton but he doesn't look away or take his hand off him, just cradles Eugene's neck like a child's, like something vulnerable.

"Go rest your eyes." he insists again and Eugene's not sure what happens after that because as soon as his eyes dip closed, he drops into a stone-cold unconsciousness.


	4. Hands

When Eugene tells Shelton his dog died, it's his hands that give away how he's really feeling. They're clasped into a tight lock, then playing nervously around one another and he lifts one, an anxious, anticipatory curve that peaks above Eugene's shoulder but it never connects. It's just like that, Eugene thinks bitterly, with how he's missed him by a hair's breadth in his comforting.

Then Leyden speaks and there, the moment is over and Shelton's hands are back to gesturing wildly, exasperatedly like they so often do.

Naturally, they're calloused and worn. It's more the fact they've beennurtured into this shape from jobs and fistfights and trouble than solely the combat they've both found themselves in, and Eugene feels a little sad at that, wishes he could have swapped places with him some days, before they even knew each other and carry some of the weight. Even during the war, he can't carry his rifle for him but the mortar they carry together and so do they the stretcher.

In China, they'll grow cracked and red at the knuckles with the cold. He doesn't wear gloves, for some reason, says they make him feel constricted but Eugene gives him his own despite that and bullies Shelton into wearing them for his own sake. There's a bit of a fight because Shelton wouldn't be himself if he didn't talk back - however, Eugene is satisfied enough at how eventually, he usually does what he tells him.

Months later he remembers those numerous exchanges again when Shelton goes uncharacteristically soft and apologetic as he promises that from now on, he'd stay in touch and reaches over to light Eugene's cigarette for him, putting the hands right back into Eugene's focus, where they'd been missing since he woke up between New Orleans and Mobile.

Then they're back for real.

When it's hot and humid, he brushes the warm tips of his fingers as he accepts the beer Shelton hands him and he doesn't know which reprieve is sweeter: the cool condensation on the bottleneck or the instant zing of electricity that goes from point of contact through arm to shoulder to spine to infatuated brain.

But he does know, and he starts chasing that wire high anywhere he can: like under the dinner table, casually sliding his hand off his lap in the hopes that Shelton will find it.

More brazenly some time later, when they part from a covert kiss all flushed and drowsy to the curve of their cheeks and then Eugene gets creative, chasing it with his teeth, with his tongue, in bed, in the grey morning.

Having them close makes him less adamant about it, eventually. The youthful and feverish obsessiveness is replaced by something more nurturing and he knows he can take more, now, can hold them close for longer when they're home. And yet, there's a strange habit that sprouts in lieu of the mania, that Eugene gladly accepts like the scar to a once gashing wound:

He's gently curling his index around Shelton's ring finger every night they sleep side by side.


	5. Distance

They sleep head to head through the thin wall. 

The house was built as a fancy apartment complex in the thirties, aiming to fish a clientele of the wealthy, artists and businessmen who could afford a spacious condo and it still shows, Eugene thinks, in the way his bedroom feels strangely cut off and the plumbing in his bathroom is haphazard, like an afterthought. He wonders what it's like on the other side of the wall, if maybe his neighbour had the original kitchen, the original toilet, and whether he noticed it too, that their apartments were meant to be one, and bigger.

In some shapes and forms the bygone glory of the original art deco modelling still peeks through - especially the entrance hall with the brown and glossy tiles and the gold details on the ceiling - but the door was replaced with a sturdier one in an ugly, washed, grey by those new developers, and the brittle cement walls that keep the inhabitants apart, each one plopped down in their own little nest, were the making of a cheap money-making scheme many years later, when they realized that chic translated to something different in the 70s.

He meets his neighbor’s habits before he meets him in person and he builds a persona around him: The music from through the wall has him thinking they must be around the same age - not all new but not all old either. Eugene recognizes some of the songs from back when he was younger and while only some of them are the kind they used to play in diners on loop, he feels welcome by them and his imaginary kinship to the stranger in 406. He has the habit of staying up late, and so does Eugene. And often, he comes home past midnight to stumble around and Eugene thinks he can smell the sizzling oil in the pan through that small gap of distance between them, the wall that’s not even supposed to be there. 

It’s a man, from the way he sings off-key and talks loudly and laughs even louder than that and of course, sometimes it’s grating and sometimes all Eugene wants to do is get some goddamn sleep but overall, he thinks they’re the same or, at least, not all that different.

When he meets him in person, that’s after they’ve knocked on each other’s walls in the night and after the stranger’s said “Bless You” through the wall, after a particularly loud sneeze from Eugene’s side of it.The persona he’s made up sits ill in a few places but not in all, and mostly it’s the appearance that he couldn’t have made up if he tried. 

He’s rude at first, but Eugene forgives because his lips quirk up in that mischievous way, and it’s mostly because Eugene has a type, and that’s his type, with the small, wiry frame and the being mean and the sweet, bright eyes. Like some sort of self-punishment, Eugene’s always liked the boys who mocked and teased but with this one it never gets hostile enough to deter him. He learns his name is Merriell and he learns that he has his bed by the same wall as Eugene when he comes over after they’ve befriended. He learns that his brash nature stems partially from his upbringing but not entirely and that the distance between their hometowns is but a stone’s throw - Mobile to New Orleans, New Orleans to Mobile.

It’s hopeless and unavoidable, that Eugene falls in love with him eventually. In 20/20 retrospect he thinks he’d seen it coming and takes notes on the small things that were charming even before they’ve ever really met but ultimately it’s still a way to distract from the gut-wrenching and intense attraction he’s subject to, in the relative cold of November. 

Merriell’s heating wasn’t really down, Eugene later learns. He’d made it all up to worm his way into Eugene’s apartment, onto the couch at first, but not for long, into his bedroom, into his bed, under his blanket, under his skin. The scheme is equal parts mockery and a godsend and by the very nature of it, the most _him_ thing Merriell could do but it’s definitely more one than the other because when he spends the night buried skin-deep and close, he understands the real reason why he felt the wall was never supposed to be there.


	6. Whisper

In the dead of night, Merriell sneaks tip-toed and clandestine, through the blue and silver hallway, to the very tempting other side of it. A short journey, just a couple of feet from his own door to Eugene’s, but difficult regardless, with the watchdog that is the grand master bedroom slotted between the two of them.

He knows Eugene is up and waiting impatiently on his bed or the armchair or the stool by his table, depending on his mood, and that as soon as Merriell entered the room he’d spring up.

A floorboard creaks, a loud landmine beneath his bare foot and he immediately jumps his glance over to the west-facing side of the hallway to watch out for the yellow line of light under Eugene’s parents’ bedroom door. Nothing flickers, no movement, no sound and he makes it across to the other side, putting one cautious hand on the brass doorknob and turns.

Eugene is all over him as soon as the door clicks shut.

“Are they asleep?” he whispers, following the line of Merriell’s throat with his mouth, moving to pull his skin between his lips, his teeth. There’s a quiet groan and Merriell’s not sure who it’s from but he nods, ushering Eugene back toward the bed. He sits him down into the slight give of the mattress, firmly pushes at his sternum before he climbs into his lap, knees pressed into Eugene’s thighs on each side. The hands on his waist are warm and strong and Merriell relishes in the feel of them as they push at him, pull him taut in anticipatory pleasure.

“You missed me?” Merriell asks him and Eugene sighs, dreamy and swept-up.

“Yeah.”

He goes to work at the hem of Merriell’s shirt, dragging it over his oversensitive skin with the light cotton catch, then over his head, tousling his curls when it finally comes off. The contact is electric and Merriell can feel each touch in his jelly knees, in his groin.

“Can you believe we’re sneaking around like teenagers?” Eugene asks him, grinning wily in that own way of his, smirking without baring his teeth and a conspiratorial hue to his whisper-quiet tone, in on the joke. His lips connect with Merriell’s bobbing throat and he sucks hard enough to get the essence of it stuck on his gums, in his nose. He’s desperate to taste him, desperate to hear Merriell react - He’s crazy, obsessive, feverish in his desperation and through Eugene’s actions Merriell can tell the extent of his brainless infatuation and that he’s operating purely on instinct, all wild, all primal. It’d be that bit too much if Merriell wasn’t so turned on by it too, turning himself over to the animal possessiveness voluntarily, and there’s something that makes it all the better for it, something that has Merriell revealing everything in him that’s vulnerable, everything that wants to be good, to behave, to be lead. He moans with his hands buried in Eugene’s hair as he slides lower, lower still, nibs at his throat, his shoulder, his nipple…

When they kiss, Eugene presses his thumbs to the underside of Merriell’s jaw, gently tilting him this way and that when he slips his tongue past the second pair of lips and prompts Merriell to slot his open mouth against his. Eugene’s testing the waters with the tip of his tongue, curling it invitingly, as though beckoning Merriell closer. The press is more insistent the second time and it spreads in him, from the point of his sensitized lips, radiating down to his chest, his shoulders all tingly and hot and feverish.

“We should be more careful.” whispers Eugene but he’s not taking it seriously because right after, he grinds his hips up just right, just enough to lift Merriell’s thighs up from his calves and he moans, so high in his throat, too loud from being taken aback by the movement.

“Oh _fuck_.” Merriell whispers back, chasing the high with a thrust of his own.

“‘M not gonna be able to be careful much longer.”


	7. Husband

“Would you, if we could?”

It provokes a fight, one Sunday afternoon. Snafu’s lounging on the couch, one leg lazily dangling over one end of it. He’s reading the newspaper and smoking, and he’s up to his second coffee when Eugene asks him that. As lovely as the day had started - a sunshine rise, morning sex tangled into the sheets, body, soft, soft, body and an intimate shared shower after - it was no protection from the day eventually turning for the worse.

In their defense, the past two weeks had been stressful: the paychecks were wearing thin toward the end of the month yet classes and work hours increased mercilessly despite it. Like a cosmic trial, their shifts were placed so painstakingly opposite that they hardly saw each other at home and each day ended with one of them dropping heavy, dead-weighted into the bed while the other had already been asleep or half-awake for hours. Eugene got cranky with too much work and Snafu got cranky with too little money so Snafu thought it’d be a much-needed reprieve from the hustle of the past two weeks, to spend a lazy Sunday together and neck on the living room couch and cook together and maybe sleep with each other again, after, but Snafu has to ask and he has to be technical about it.

“Would what?”

“Marry me. If we could.”

Snafu folds the newspaper and places it in his lap, reaching for a cigarette on the side-table.

“Well, we  _ can’t _ .” he points out with the click of his lighter, despite him knowing it’s not what Eugene wants to hear. Snafu exhales; he knows he could make it all go away if he said that of course he would,  _ you’re the love of my life, of course I’d marry you _ but something inside him that’s all bitter and bile about how they can’t, urges him into the spiel of rejecting the notion, maybe even rejecting Eugene for self-preservation.

“That’s not what I’m asking.” Eugene huffs, annoyed. Snafu’s almost sorry for being so difficult.

“I’m asking  _ hypothetically _ , that if we were able to, if we could… would you?”

“How would that even work? Who’d wear the dress?”

Snafu likes to joke to distract and sometimes it works but he has an inkling that today, it won’t.

He’s right; all it does is feed the fire and Eugene - his beautiful fire-headed darling, his puppy-eyed, soft-lipped, gentle Eugene - forcefully drops his coffee cup into the sink so that it clatters against the metal of the spoon and gives that dangerous, passive-aggressive warning.

“You know what I’m asking, you just don’t wanna fucking answer.”

Snafu does know. He knows that what Eugene’s really asking is  _ Do you love me enough? _ and yeah, Snafu does, that’s not the point, of  _ course _ Snafu does, he loves him to the moon and back, so much he shouldn’t think twice about it, so much he’d take twenty years off his life if it meant he wouldn’t have to go a second without Eugene, but Snafu also doesn’t like being coerced into showing his cards and Eugene’s tendency to ask questions he has one right answer to makes him petty and tempts him to fight.

“I don’t wanna answer because I know you don’t wanna hear it. You just wanna hear what you got your mind set on.”

“Is that so wrong?” Eugene then cries, arms rising exasperatedly above his head. “What’s the harm in that?”

“I don’t like it.”

And Snafu acts like he’s done with the conversation and goes back to his newspaper all the while his brain is desperately screaming at him: Fix it! Fix it!

“Oh, fuck you.”

The point of no return. Snafu can hear Eugene grab for his coat, angrily fish for his keys before he stomps toward the door with all the infuriated force in the world and Snafu brings out one fake-casual “Yeah.” before the door slams shut and Eugene disappears all day.

Snafu’s hurting ferociously.

Two more days pass because they’re both too stubborn to do anything about their pain, two more days with dry conversation, one-worded answers, the bare minimum. Snafu knows that one of them has to give, eventually, and he thinks that if there’s a way for it to be him, it’d involve him hate-fucking Eugene first, just so he’d get it out, give himself some semblance of power first. 

They’re both so pent-up and frustrated from all the things at once: being broke, being overworked, fighting, that when Snafu bends Eugene over the kitchen counter on the third day, he goes submissive, easy, slack, without a fight.

Eugene, too, is so tired from the constant tension that he’s not trying to fight or come out on top, so tired that he opens up immediately with his trousers pulled no further than his knees, lets Snafu take him from behind if only to feel that cathartic relief of being jostled, being roughed up, being fucked into an apology so hard he could cry with it - and it works.

Snafu feels sorry, after, too distant and removed in the way he treated Eugene and Eugene’s just quiet and sullen, leaned up against the counter as he’s buttoning his shirt closed. They’re stood opposite another, passing a cigarette back and forth but hardly saying a word which feels even more silent with the echo of the moans and curses and mean dirty talk from before. Snafu’s on the cusp of saying the words, just needs that last little push before he can start the sentence, but Eugene takes it away from him.

“I’m sorry. I think I get it now.”

It doesn’t feel right for it to be Eugene - Snafu was the one being petty and cruel and he’s the one who should be kissing it better.

“You shouldn’t be.”

Snafu pauses, tries to find the right words.

“I know I was bein’ an ass. I could’ve just levelled with you from the start and while I was fightin’ you on it, I already knew it wasn’t right-”

“I did push you too hard, though. We both know that never works.”

Snafu laughs, helpless.

“Yeah, I s’pose it don’t…”

It goes back to that infinite source of mutual understanding they have for each other, archives full of intimate knowledge, the machinations and motives of one another. It’s based on that and the well of that fresh, green and crystal love that sprouts from the cracks and crevices of age old, fabricated walls - the ones being hopelessly torn down each time another conflict resolves and they find their way back home.

“Ask me again?”

Snafu feels it now, he’s vulnerable and in love and he wants to bathe in it until his fingers go pruney - Eugene allows him.

“If we could, would you?”

It only takes him a split-second to see Eugene,  _ his _ Eugene through the years they’ve been together - his sweet and gentle doe eyes, his nurturing touch - sees him waking up next to him all drowsy and warm with the sunlight and stretching with a content smile, sees him hunched over him at night, a firm, determined line to his brows, his mouth and sees him under him when he’s fully letting go. It takes another split-second to spin the thought further, years into the future with the same eyes, the same nurturing touch and really, it’s as clear as day and there was never really a reason for it not to be. He sees that now.

“Yeah.” Snafu says and Eugene’s face lights up all love and joy.

“Yeah, I would.”


End file.
